My Report From China
This is pretty interesting.
Affluent people around the globe choose to opt-out of a test-driven culture. The difference in China appears to be that all the test pressure is on the kids and families because colleges look only at the one test score. Here in the states, all of the pressure is on the teachers because federal policies view test scores as a blame mechanism. The kids here will be accepted at colleges no matter what--certainly not "the best" colleges, but we have a lot of colleges here, and those colleges will complain about having to remediate, thus ratcheting up the pressure on the K-12 teachers to raise those numbers! Pretty soon districts start hiring incompetent, mouth-taping, phrase-spouting charlatans like Michelle Rhee and what you have is the public school death spiral, with schools sculpting their graduating classes in such a way that the only the kids likely to graduate are encouraged to start their senior year in those schools.
Affluent people around the globe choose to opt-out of a test-driven culture. The difference in China appears to be that all the test pressure is on the kids and families because colleges look only at the one test score. Here in the states, all of the pressure is on the teachers because federal policies view test scores as a blame mechanism. The kids here will be accepted at colleges no matter what--certainly not "the best" colleges, but we have a lot of colleges here, and those colleges will complain about having to remediate, thus ratcheting up the pressure on the K-12 teachers to raise those numbers! Pretty soon districts start hiring incompetent, mouth-taping, phrase-spouting charlatans like Michelle Rhee and what you have is the public school death spiral, with schools sculpting their graduating classes in such a way that the only the kids likely to graduate are encouraged to start their senior year in those schools.
The Great Undoing
I just want to point out that under President Obama, we have a pretty high ranking government officials walking back Brown vs. Board of Education, and that we're all just a little too busy to talk about it. It's just weird that not only is the goal of integration dead, but that policies promoting self-segregation are alive under the first African American president. And the people doing it are pretty much in denial about the difference between an excellent, comprehensive education and a school where the tough cases have been booted and there are these marginal increases in standardized test scores.
We're going to regret these years.
We're going to regret these years.